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30 years later, Challenger calamity still resonates in Boulder County

By Charlie Brennan

Staff Writer

Posted:
01/23/2016 10:00:00 AM MST

Updated:
01/28/2016 12:17:31 PM MST

The Space Shuttle Challenger explodes shortly after lifting off from Kennedy Space Center, Fla. on Jan. 28, 1986. All seven crew members died in the explosion, which was witnessed by a group of Boulder County middle school students. (BRUCE WEAVER / Associated Press)

If you go

What: Challenger/Columbia Memorial, presented by the Arnold Air Society

For 73 seconds, the Space Shuttle Challenger soared through a cloudless Florida sky over the Atlantic ocean after its long-delayed launch from Cape Canaveral.

As it described a soaring arc racing at close to 2,000 mph into the perfect blue, the Boulder school children with whom I stood at a Kennedy Space Center viewing area let out exclamations of wonder at the spacecraft carrying a crew of seven that included University of Colorado graduate Lt. Col. Ellison Onizuka and New Hampshire teacher Christa McAuliffe.

McAuliffe was the first private citizen aboard a shuttle, and her inclusion in the mission was helping to push the live television audience to an estimated 17 percent of Americans.

The rush of anticipation helped to counter the morning chill with which spectators were contending, temperatures having sunk to below freezing overnight.

But suddenly it was as if Challenger hit an invisible ceiling just short of five miles into the air, 18 miles out over the ocean. There was no further forward motion that I could see. The spacecraft vanished in a sudden, billowing ball of fire.

"Is it supposed to do that?" a man nearby asked aloud.

It didn't seem like a stupid question. On the chilly morning of Jan. 28, 1986, I was watching my first launch in person, as a reporter assigned to cover it by the Rocky Mountain News. Without the distancing effect of a television screen, the power of liftoff and what should normally follow was something for which I had no frame of reference.

What was it supposed to look like? I didn't know — but was confident the answer was, nothing like this.

Lt. Col. Ellison S. Onizuka was a CU-Boulder graduate who died in the Challenger explosion.

Already, pieces of the spacecraft were corkscrewing toward the ocean's surface. The horrible truth seemed as clear as the azure sky now marred by a chalky hydra-cloud of ruin that rapidly grew and mutated in the light winds aloft.

We had witnessed what was at that time the worst disaster in space history. It was a catastrophe that would freeze the space shuttle program in its tracks for 32 months, prompting an intense external examination. Investigations in its wake traced the causes to a failure in the O-rings sealing a joint of the right solid rocket booster, but also faulted the management structure at NASA and a lack of major checks leading to a flawed decision to even launch that day.

Before tragedy, delays, and disappointment

Six Boulder County school middle school student were being treated to a trip to Florida by Boulder's Ball Aerospace as a reward for winning an essay contest.

Instead of a glorious celebration, they were given a sobering lesson in mankind's imperfections and capacity for failure.

"Innocence masks horror of explosion for visiting pupils," the headline on my story the next day would read. And my sense was that more broadly, a degree of cultural innocence was, in a sense, one more victim of the space shuttle disaster.

It was the 25th launch for the space shuttle program, the 10th for the Challenger. It came at a time when someone saying "If we can put a man on the moon, then surely we can..." did not yet sound like the anachronism it does today.

Students and teachers from Boulder County leave the Kennedy Space Center viewing area Jan. 28, 1986 with smoke from the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger behind them. (Karl Gehring / The Denver Post)

The launch of NASA's STS-51L had been repeatedly delayed, for factors ranging from a cold front bearing the threat of rain passing through Florida to unfavorable conditions at an abort-landing site in Dakar, Senegal.

When a scheduled liftoff was delayed two days earlier, I found myself instead watching the Chicago Bears dismantle the New England patriots in Super Bowl XX at a hotel bar with then-University of Colorado President Gordon Gee. The feared weather front, as it happened, had actually hovered safely, well north of the Cape until well after the scrubbed launch time. But another day was lost.

Some members of the sizable CU contingent on hand couldn't conceal their impatience.

CU's stakes in the launch were high. Beyond the Onizuka connection, the university was also invested in the success of the $5 million Spartan Halley satellite that was on board, manufactured by CU's Laboratory for Atmospheric Space Physics.

"It's disgusting. It's a beautiful day for a launch," John Buechner, at that time a CU director for public affairs, said of the Jan. 26 delay.

And by the time the chilly morning of Jan. 28 rolled around, a columnist for a Denver newspaper had tired of the hurry-up-and-wait. He drove inland to Orlando, banking on finding something of greater interest at Disney World.

'Pressure to get it launched'

Alan Stern, of Boulder's Southwest Research Institute, the principal investigator on the acclaimed July 14, 2015 flyby of Pluto by NASA's New Horizons Mission, was also at the Kennedy Space Center. He was principal investigator on CHAMPs, a camera system to be used in studying Halley's Comet from the shuttle. Stern was also project scientist for LASP's Spartan Halley.

"As I saw it liftoff, I was very happy to know we were finally underway," Stern said in an interview last week. "There was a great deal of schedule pressure to get it launched, to clear the launch pad for (the) Gallileo (mission), to Jupiter.

"Seeing it launch was a feeling of relief, that we were not going to get carted away. Really, the system was within days of dismantling that shuttle to making room for another."

And then relief turned to horror.

David Aguilar, then the director of Ball's marketing and communications department, was the company's escort for the kids' visit.

"You could hear people saying, 'Ooh and aah,' like they were watching fireworks, and I was thinking, 'This is not right. There is something terribly wrong.' And then the silence hit."

That silence would famously be cut by the dry but fraught words emanating from mission control: "Flight controllers here looking very carefully at the situation... Obviously a major malfunction."

Stern, viewing from the VIP viewing site at the space center, said, "From the standpoint of standing there and watching that, it was bewildering and upsetting. It was incredibly sad, on many levels, for the people that were there — for the astronauts who lost their lives, the science that was lost, the space shuttle that was lost, for the country and for NASA."

Some good came from historic loss

Frederick resident Ernie Banks, a former Erie resident who retired from Ball Aerospace last week at the age of 66, was an eyewitness to Challenger, as an astronaut trainer for McDonnell Douglas, subcontracting to NASA. He would also be on duty in the same capacity Feb. 1, 2003, for the tragic disintegration of the Space Shuttle Columbia upon its re-entry over Texas and Louisiana.

"We'd always known that there was a possibility that something like that could happen, and we still couldn't believe it came true," Banks said. "Probably no matter how well you design a spacecraft, it's still a dangerous occupation."

Ball took the students and their teachers back to Florida for the resumption of NASA's manned space program for the Sept. 29, 1988, launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery. Aguilar was there again with them. He remembers the "tens of thousands" of people on hand to witness the launch.

What had previously become nearly routine was now anything but, and Aguilar recalled thinking about the possible motivations of so many spectators, whether they were all "wondering if it was going to happen again."

Aguilar cherished the chance to show the youngsters that the unforgettable and historic setback they had witnessed was but one chapter in a much bigger story still being written.

"We took the same students and the same teachers back," Aguilar said. "It was to see how much we'd learned, and to conquer our fears about our ability to move back into space and to explore it — which is really the story of all human history and technology and exploration."

"Looking back 30 years, it's still a great tragedy," Stern said. "And despite the tragedy, when we look back 30 years later, we can accept that from tragedy, some good things ultimately came out of it."

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